There is a need to interact with applications over the Internet. The development of web browsers aided this need. For example, a web browser sends a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) request to a web server via Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The web server receives the request and routes it to an appropriate database via an Open Database Connection (ODBC). Active Server Pages (ASP) or Java Scripts are used on the web server to translate and determine location and routing of the HTML requests and responses from the application database. The responses are translated into an HTML web page and sent back to the web browser using HTTP.
Application servers speed up the access to application databases. Servlets or enterprise java beans (EJB) reside on the application server and are “hardcoded” to make specific database calls. The requests from the application server are made through Java Database Connections (JDBC).